The folks at the Toronto law firm Hicks Morley are leaps and bounds ahead of most other firms in their wiki use. They are using the wiki-based platform ThoughtFarmer as their whole intranet. This has had advantages, including being quick to set up and cost effective compared to other intranet or portal platforms.

In October Knowledge Management Specialist Heather Colman made a presentation to both the Toronto and New York Legal KM Groups, and we subsequently invited her to present at Toronto Wiki Tuesdays. These were her slides: . . . [more]

With the renovations progressing here at the DMP Law Library, most of our print has moved off site, and is harder to get. To compensate the students, I’ve been giving some instruction in electronic-only legal research, and even though I’m immersed in this topic every day, it is still surprising to me just how much can be accomplished online. Generally, of course, Legislation that has any historical aspect still requires the print for most jurisdictions, though CanLII’s new point-in-time functions are great, and some jurisdictions offer this sort of detail online.

For Canadian case law, just about anything you want . . . [more]

I will be speaking later this month on February 25, 2009, in New York at the Ark Group conference Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library & Information Service Centers.

I chose to speak at the session entitled “Risk & Innovation: Aligning Technology with Explicit Business Goals” in part to give and receive ideas on some of the technology-related initiatives we are undertaking in my department (and I will not necessarily focus just on technology since such a focus can distort the importance of non-technological ideas).

From the 40,000 foot level, innovation with technology in law libraries . . . [more]

Just over three decades ago, the Canadian Law Information Council was established by the federal and provincial governments in order to create a framework for online access to legal information in Canada. The idea was that a national council of all of the interested parties could work together to ensure that any development was in the best interest of Canadians.

At the time, there was a serious concern that online databases of Canadian legal information would be built and controlled from the United States, with the result that Canadians would have to go offshore to access their own laws in . . . [more]

Most knowledge management systems and frameworks are built on the premise that we can encourage people to share what they know. However, sharing is what we do in kindergarten – trading is what we learn to do later in life. Most organizations could benefit from looking at knowledge strategy initiatives through a market lens rather than a simplistic sharing lens. We need to rethink some of our KM strategies and examine the knowledge processes in our organizations with a market perspective in mind. Consistent with that thought, Larry Prusak said “people don’t just give knowledge away. Knowledge does not flow . . . [more]

CCH Australia has just released an interesting study on Web 2.0 usage by professionals in HR, law, accounting and tax in the Asia-Pacific. They consulted 200+ professionals in the region about current and expected usage in their professional and personal lives. A few snippets of note:

• Blogs are used about equally for professional and personal reasons.
• Wikis are slightly more popular for professional use.
• Not surprisingly, social networking sites are significantly more frequently used for personal purposes.

I was also interested to read the reasons why professionals use Web 2.0 tools, and the types of information that they are used . . . [more]

As per the title of this post: Interwoven Announces Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Autonomy.

Many law firms in Canada (and the United States) use Interwoven for their document management system (DMS). Interwoven is a very robust DMS that can manage large volumes of documents while keeping good version control and honoring security settings. However, up to and including version 8.2, many users complain that its search capabilities were too arcane (searching has been improved with version 8.3 which involved Interwoven incorporating Vivisimo search technology). Plus, Interwoven’s Universal Search product appears to be getting good buzz.

As such, . . . [more]

Joel Alleyne’s December column: The Need to Forget – Less Is More has been on my mind since reading it, though perhaps this incongruous statement should be “in” my mind. Unlike the individual described in the column, my challenge is more often remembering rather than forgetting.

Specific factors in my organization require me to act as the facilitator of institutional memory:

• I have been with my firm for 10 years and part of our technology committee for the entire time
• The combined longevity of our entire 5 person IT team is about 13 years
• I monitor RSS feeds for others

There have been numerous blog posts in the blogosphere on Richard Susskind’s new book, The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, including a recent post from Adam Smith, Esq. and several SLAW posts.

I finally read the book last night and enjoyed it, although it is largely a continuation of many of the same trends in the legal profession that Susskind has previously identified, essentially being “a market pull towards commoditization and [a] pervasive development and uptake of information technology” (p. 1). However, the book remains essential reading for anyone connected to the legal . . . [more]

An article in the recent Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), “Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age,” makes the case for urgent investment in data cyberinfrastructure — whatever is required to store, manage, catalog and access data.

(Note: that link won’t give you much joy unless you happen to subscribe to the ACM portal. Fortunately, the author, Francine Berman, who is Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has put up on her website a version of the piece in PDF, “Surviving the Data Deluge.” Such is the . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Association recently published Guidelines for Practicing Ethically with New Information Technologies (the “Guidelines”) as a supplement to its Code of Professional Conduct.

While the Guidelines provide a considerable amount of information concerning the use of technology in a legal practice (even referring to certain software in its annexes), some lawyers may find themselves at a loss as to how to actually implement the guidelines in their practice. This essay identifies certain aspects of the Guidelines that are worthy of additional commentary and refers readers to (mostly free) tools which will prove useful in following the Guidelines. . . . [more]

CanLII announced this evening that, together with LexUM, it has released Reflex, “a tool allowing you to hyperlink your documentation with CanLII’s material.”

The simple notion is that, on the Reflex page, you upload a document (or a case name or single citation) from your machine and Reflex, recognizing case names, citations and legislation data, will edit that document by supplying citations (where necessary) and hyperlinks to the appropriate text. You can save the final result as an HTML document (which, of course, you can then convert to other formats as needed). Reflex accepts material in the following formats: . . . [more]